Improve release process

[wangzhen127]

Currently the release process is very manual. And only @Random-Liu can run make push. We should simplify the release process.

CC @Random-Liu @vteratipally @hakman

[wangzhen127]

Discussed with @BenTheElder offline. The main pain point of pushing and pulling from gs://kubernetes-release can be removed by just using the github.com file hosting in release notes. Since we already upload tar files in release notes, this would be a simple change.

See kubernetes/kubernetes#123741

[hakman]

@wangzhen127 We can also promote binaries, like we do for kOps to the bucket (via k8s.io repo) and just link them in release notes.
Ref: kubernetes/k8s.io#6368

[wangzhen127]

That's also fine. But using the github hosting file is the simplest way for now.

Does your organization set up NPD as system daemon of daemonset? So far, cluster/gce/gci/configure.sh is the only place setting it up as system daemon as far as I know. Given kube-up.sh will switch to kops in the future, and kops decides to treat NPD as addons, it may not worth the effort to set up pipelines to promote binaries.

[hakman]

I am fine with images at the moment.
kOps already has NPD as an addon 😄 . See kubernetes/kops#11381.
We should update the NPD tests to run via kOps in the near future.

[wangzhen127]

Just realized a few things

• NPD releases tar files to gs://kubernetes-release/node-problem-detector/ historically. No one has permission to push files to it now. We only have tar files up to v0.8.10 in the GCS bucket.
• Currently k/k's default NPD version is:
  • k/k 1.28 uses NPD v0.8.9
  • k/k 1.29 uses NPD v0.8.13
  • k/k 1.30 uses NPD v0.8.13
• NPD's standalone mode configuration in k/k depends on the tar files in the above GCS bucket. Given none of k/k's release blocking tests fail, we already lost the test coverage for about half a year (for both k/k 1.29 and 1.30). I filed Missing test coverage for standalone mode configuration #878 for tracking separately.

For the release process, we should stop pushing tar files to gs://kubernetes-release/node-problem-detector/. We lost push permission for a long time already. Relying on github file hosting should be fine for k/k.

[wangzhen127]

I have removed the need of pushing tar files to gs://kubernetes-release during release. So any approvers should be able to make the release now. It is still a manual process. But given the low frequency of NPD releases. I can live with it for now. We can revisit if situations change.